Multimodal chromatography: an efficient tool in downstream processing of proteins

Chromatography has become an indispensable tool for the purification of proteins. Since the regulatory demands on protein purity are expected to become stricter, the need for generating improved resins for chromatographic separations has increased. More advanced scientific investigations of protein structure/function relationships, in particular, have also been a driving force for generating more sophisticated chromatographic materials for protein separations. As a consequence, the development of alternative chromatographic strategies has been very rapid during the past decade and several new ligands have been designed and explored both in the laboratory and in large-scale industrial settings. This review describes some of these efforts using multimodal chromatography, where two or more physicochemical properties are used to enhance the specificity of the interactions between the protein and the ligand on the chromatographic matrix. In addition to experimental studies, computer modeling of ligand-protein binding has improved the design of ligands for protein recognition. The use of descriptors as well as in silico docking methods have been implemented to design multimodal resins in several instances.